Local Npm module <> not found. Is it installed?

[Melindrea]

So, I've been playing around with grunt. At work everything went splendid, but now that I'm trying to run two of the npm tasks (grunt-shell and grunt-contrib), I'm running into an issue.

When I run grunt, it pops up 'Local Npm module "grunt-shell" not found. Is it installed? Local Npm module "grunt-contrib" not found. Is it installed?'. Both are, both globally with npm and locally with npm, at least I see them when I run npm list both globally and locally.

The other tasks are working fine, and the file is reported to be "lint free".

npm 1.1.25
node 0.6.18
nvm to controll version
Grunt-contrib 0.0.7
grunt-shell 0.1.1

grunt is installed globally, the two tasks are installed both globally and locally.
which grunt-shell/contrib gives: /home/marie/nvm/v0.6.18/bin/grunt-*

So, do you have any idea on what might be going wrong?

[cowboy]

When using plugins inside a project's gruntfile, npm module plugins loaded via grunt.loadNpmTasks must be installed locally (in ./node_modules/plugin_name relative to the gruntfile).

Does that help?

[Melindrea]

Yes, it did. idly annoying that they're not put there when one installs them locally, but that's clearly an npm (or maybe my system...) issue.

I really like this system, btw. Only been using it since Thursday, and already started figuring out how it can be used in some very nice ways. =)

[cowboy]

Yeah, I don't really want some automated process modifying the gruntfile, so you'll have to add them yourself!

[cyjake]

Why is it required that one should install modules locally? Isn't it possible that there might be several projects which use some module like grunt-less mutually?

[webgefrickel]

Afaik it is not required per se if your provide the correct path in grunt.loadNpmTasks.
If successfully load globally installed grunt-plugins on my system by including them like this:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('/usr/local/lib/node_modules/grunt-compass');

[cyjake]

Yes, I am aware of that. But isn't that a little bit verbose? All I want is npm install grunt-less -g, then all of my projects' grunt config which requires grunt-less will work.

Also, I noticed that there is a function called loadNpmTasksWithRequire (https://github.com/cowboy/grunt/blob/master/lib/grunt/task.js#L311). Why is that kept private?

[cowboy]

Npm doesn't provide a mechanism for loading globally-installed modules. Which is good, because you want them to be installed local to your project, anyways.

Imagine a scenario where project A requires v1.0.0 of a plugin, so you install it globally, and everything works great. Then you start work on project B which requires features in v2.0.0 of the same plugin, so you install that globally. When finished with project B, you switch back to project A, run grunt and boom everything explodes because it's now using the wrong version of the plugin.

If you only worked on one project, ever, having everything installed globally would work... but the instant you start to work on multiple projects, it just doesn't scale. So install your project's dependencies locally, and you won't ever run into this problem.

And FWIW, even though you install grunt globally, as of v0.4.0 (coming soon) the global grunt will defer to any locally-installed grunt you may have installed, so in that specific case, you'll get the benefit of both the "global" plus "local" behavior.

[cyjake]

Ah, now I understand your intention. I thought npm would provide multiple version support like gem in ruby land. Maybe something like the bundler of ruby will help?

Looking forward to your v0.4.0. Thanks for your patient reply.

[cowboy]

@dotnil many people think Npm should handle the multiple version support like gems do, but it doesn't. I'm not sure why, tbh.

[philfreo]

I'm sure many others will end up with this problem. If you don't have a node_modules folder or package.json file installing grunt-contrib even without the -g flag will make npm search for one of those two things up until it hits your global location. So make that folder or a package.json first.

[alexgorbatchev]

👎 I find this requirement superficial and restrictive. If I want to have multiple Gruntfiles in nested modules, there's no reason why grunt can't look up the folder and see my tasks in one central location. I have a few dozen modules in my project all of which reuse parent model node_modules folder so that I don't have to have same dependencies installed over and over again everywhere. Trying to setup per module grunt file is proving to be a giant pain because of this "opinionated" restriction.

[alexgorbatchev]

Found that you can also do this... it's more concise than loadNpmTasks

module.exports = (grunt) ->
  require('grunt-mocha/tasks/mocha')(grunt)

[LeezQ]

@alexgorbatchev cant't agree anymore.

[LeezQ]

I think grunt.loadNpmTasks should have support positive node_module dir . like require in nodejs, then I can have same node_modules in parent dir , and I can have own Gruntfile in sub-project .

[patrickkettner]

I needed to load modules from inside of modules, so I hacked on @sindresorhus' lovely load-grunt-tasks, and made load-grunt-subtasks. I believe it would cover most of the use cases people were looking for here

[cowboy]

@patrickkettner if you specify dependency plugins as peerDependencies you shouldn't need to do anything special. See:

https://github.com/gruntjs/grunt-contrib/blob/master/package.json#L36-L63
https://github.com/gruntjs/grunt-contrib/blob/master/tasks/contrib.js#L12-L17

[patrickkettner]

@cowboy thanks! I am not sure it applies in my exact case.

I have project X that has arbitrary projects foo, bar, and baz, all of which are also used in project Y.

X
├─┬ foo
│ ├── grunt-one
│ ├── grunt-wo
├─┬ bar
│ ├── grunt-threeThistTmeItsPersonal
├─┬ baz
│ ├── grunt-contrib-clean

Where as Y may be structured like

Y
├─┬ foo
│ ├── grunt-one
│ ├── grunt-wo
├─┬ baz
│ ├── grunt-contrib-clean

I wanted a way to share the grunt plugins of foo, bar, and baz in a top level project. Having all of those modules defined in X and Y's own package.json leads to a bit more overhead than i would prefer to have.

[cowboy]

Yeah, your use-case is pretty non-standard.

[patrickkettner]

yep, thanks a ton for reaching out

[peterbraden]

So if I load a module in grunt, and that module has dependencies, then they won't be loaded? This seems like a pretty broken system, why not just use require?

[dcleao]

Hi @cowboy,
so it's non-standard to want to have the Gruntfile.js not beside the node_modules folder?

project/
 \_ node_modules/
      \_ grunt/
      \_ grunt-contrig-something/
 \_ configs/
      \_ Gruntfile.js
 \_ package.json

Simply, executing, from the project root:

$ grunt -gruntfile "configs/Gruntfile.js"

fails. Amazing.

Is this a way to force people place the "Gruntfile.js" beside "package.json" ?
Or else, we're forced to not use grunt.loadNpmTasks...
Makes me wonder why you even have the "-gruntfile" option.
Funny, also, that in a lot of other places of grunt's code, it does findUp for node_modules.
I'm disappointed.

[shawnholt]

So the implication is you can't mix a global install of some modules and others locally without explicitly specifying. That wasn't intuitive to me at least....

[flocsy]

@webgefrickel it only works with loadTasks instead of loadNpmTasks:
grunt.loadTasks('/usr/local/lib/node_modules/grunt-compass');

[chasepeeler]

I know this is old, but, anyone just finding this like I did, use load-grunt-tasks as mentioned above, with the requireResolution option set to true:

require('load-grunt-tasks')(grunt,{requireResolution: true});